Obsidian Wings

"Politics have no place in health care": Excuse me, are you *new*?!?

by Doctor Science

I didn't post about The Great Komen Foundation vs. Planned Parenthood Clash of the Titans last week, mostly because D & I both had viral gastroenteritis. It was vile, but at least the kids didn't get it.

One thing that made me laugh incredulously:

"Politics have no place in health care," Bloomberg said in a statement on Thursday. "Breast cancer screening saves lives and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care. We should be helping women access that care, not placing barriers in their way."

Excuse me, Mister Mayor, are you new?!? It's been *years* since politics had no place in health care -- women's health care, at least. In America there is no apolitical gynecology.

A stained-glass window of Clash of the Titans, made for Ray Harryhausen's house. I completely agree with Medusa.

Ta-Nehisi Coates noted that Planned Parenthood has a very deep bench:

I don't think that Handel, or her allies, quite understood the nature of their adversaries. I mentioned this in comments the other day but it's interesting to look at how Planned Parenthood has weathered under targeting from the Right, as compared with other groups. This is not like ACORN. Whatever their significant work in poor communities and black and Latino communities, Planned Parenthood has touched women across race and across class, and thus indirectly, touched men across race and class too.

I am one of those women.

My mid-week shocker

by liberal japonicus

This article, about the reinvention of malls, was moving past my eyes, when this paragraph appeared:

A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006, according to Professor Dunham-Jones, and many ambitious projects, like New Jersey’s Xanadu just west of Manhattan, have lain half-finished for years. (emphasis mine)

2006?!?  Perhaps I'm being naive, but this just amazed me. Is this some restricted definition of enclosed mall, or should I really start speaking Chinese with my daughters?

What do libertarians have against my marriage?

by Doctor Science

In the last open thread, Matt McIrwin linked to a report about NH's same-sex marriage debate:

Rep. Seth Cohn, a Canterbury Republican who moved here as part of the Free State project, a libertarian movement to relocate to New Hampshire ... said he plans to introduce an amendment on the House floor that would take government entirely out of marriage, instead giving all couples a civil union and leaving marriage up to churches and other religious institutions. That same approach is supported by the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, a libertarian-leaning group that endorsed 107 House members elected in 2010.

I have seen this proposal made repeatedly over the years, mostly coming from libertarians or their sympathizers. I have NO CLUE where they are getting the idea that this is a fair, reasonable, straightforward solution, and how it is standing up to even the most cursory examination.

I have been civilly married for almost 25 years. In what respect is my marriage not "marriage" enough to keep the name -- and the protection of a very large and well-established system of law? I haven't been able to find good numbers, but I saw a vague estimate that 1/4 to 1/3 of US marriages are civil ceremonies. Have the people saying "government should get out of the marriage business and leave it up to the religions" completely forgotten about secular, civil marriages? Or do they really, in their hearts, believe that my marriage isn't important, that I wouldn't lose anything if it was defined away?

This topic makes me so angry I can barely see straight. I'd really appreciate it if someone who is less personally implicated by this aggressively stupid and offensive meme could explain to me where it comes from, why soi-disant libertarians think it's a good idea to remove a crucial type of contract out of secular hands, and how the idea can be *stopped* -- besides screaming and ripping people's heads off. Which would be unmannerly.

Civil Wedding, by Swiss painter Albert Anker.

Remix at the Super Bowl

by Doctor Science

When I heard the halftime show at the Super Bowl would be Madonna, I knew it was going to be something pretty flamboyant in the way of over-the-top entertainment. But I didn't imagine that it was going to be a fannish remix.

To refresh your memory, or to let you see it for the first time:

(behind the cut: videos, also an image of classical artistic nudity)

Your they write letters Friday open thread

This letter (picked up from Yahoo news), from a former slave answering his master's request that he return is the topic of today's open thread. 

Apart from the wonderful window it opens up on history (and the exquisitely modulated sarcasm, excerpting it here would not do the letter justice), it provides a jumping off point for whatever strikes your fancy. Still, the last line is the best.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Have at it.

The Color of the Country: Demographic History of the US Black Population

by Doctor Science

I stayed up waaaaaaay too late Monday night because I got caught up in Science. Or rather, Research. As so often happens on the Internet, I started with one small question and hopped link to link until I found myself in a World of Mystery, or maybe Discovery.

Along the way, I created a graph of the growth of the US population by race -- because, astonishingly enough, I couldn't readily find one online already. If you happen to know that I'm just looking in the wrong place, please say so -- I'm not proud.

Winter Landscape by John Wesley Hardrick, African-American painter from Indianapolis.

This all started because of Newsweek's Oscar Roundtable, at which Viola Davis said some pretty forthright things about how difficult Hollywood is for a black actress. This was linked at discussed at a bunch of places, including by Allison Samuels at the Daily Beast.

In the comments to Samuels' article, Justsaan said

I love watching the Classic B&W movies. How many black, asian or any other race were represented? If I didn't know any better I would have thought that the world was only white, and for anyone not to acknowledge that this is very simply ODD and just STRANGE; how the actors lived and worked with what looked like ease and no sense of something being wrong with the representation

Commenter MeesterTaco replied,

If you look at the ethnic breakdown of the US, those who identify themselves as African-American are less that 9% (2000 census data) and far less during the time these 'classics' were made.

Say what?! says I. In the first place, I was pretty sure that the proportion of blacks in the population now is higher than that, more like 12%. In the second place, I recalled that the first census (1790) showed blacks, free and slave, as maybe 18-19% of the population then. So I figured the "proportion black" of the US population had dropped pretty steadily over the centuries, as whites were allowed to immigrate in and blacks were not.

So I figured, "I'll go look it up. It should only take a couple of minutes to find a graph of the change in the racial makeup of the US over time."

Hours later, I made my own:

The full dataset is here. I was supposed to be able to embed it as an interactive graph, but the scripts don't seem to be working. Do any of you understand GoogleDocs Spreadsheets?.

I present the data as separate bars, even though they all add up to 100%, so you can more easily see the patterns for "White", "Black", and "Other". "Other" is found by subtracting White and Black from 100%. Sources: 1790-1990; 2000-2010.

What we see is that the proportion of the US population classed as "Black" was indeed highest in 1790, at 19.3%, and then gradually declined until the period between WWI and WWII, when it was under 10%. Since then, the proportion has risen slightly, to just over 12%. I'm actually surprised it isn't higher recently, because for the first time since the 18th century a significant number of black people have immigrated to the US in recent decades, especially from the Caribbean. It's not clear to me whether native-born black Americans are continuing to decline as a total proportion of the population or not -- that would depend on whether black immigrants are mostly counted as "black" or as "other" (black Hispanic, mixed race, etc.).

I also looked at the actual numbers, not just percentages:

but since we're talking about populations it makes more sense to put them on a log scale, where we can more easily see the rates of change:

Poking at this that led me to yet more research and more discoveries, which I'll talk about tomorrow.